Austen and Dickens is a favorite occupation.  Also is it convenient to put a tag on every author:  a mask reading realist, romanticist, psychologue, sensation-monger, or some such designation, and then hold him to the name.  Thus, in the case of Austen it is a temptation to call her the greatest truth-teller among novelists, and so leave her.  But, as a matter of fact, great as realist and artist as she was, she does not hesitate at that heightening of effect which insures clearer seeing, longer remembering and a keener pleasure.  Perhaps she is in the broad view all the better artist because of this:  a thought sadly forgotten by the extreme veritists of our day.  It is the business of art to improve upon Nature.

Again the reader of Jane Austen must expect to find her with the limitation of her time and place:  it is, frankly, a dreadfully contracted view of the world she represents, just for the reason that it is the view of her Hampshire gentry in the day of the third George.  The ideals seem low, narrow; they lack air and light.  Woman’s only role is marriage; female propriety chokes originality; money talks, family places individuals, and the estimate of sex-relations is intricately involved with these eidola.  There is little sense of the higher and broader issues:  the spiritual restrictions are as definite as the social and geographical:  the insularity is magnificent.  It all makes you think of Tennyson’s lines: 

“They take the rustic cackle of their burg For the great wave that echoes round the world!”

Hence, one of the bye-products of Miss Austen’s books is their revelation of hide-bound class-distinction, the not seldom ugly parochialism—­the utilitarian aims of a circle of highly respectable English country folk during the closing years of the eighteenth century.  The opening sentence of her masterpiece reads:  “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”  Needless to say that “universally” here is applicable to a tiny area of earth observed by a most charming spinster, at a certain period of society now fast fading into a dim past.  But the sentence might serve fairly well as a motto for all her work:  every plot she conceived is firm-based upon this as a major premise, and the particular feminine deduction from those words may be found in the following taken from another work, “Mansfield Park”:  “Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think marriage a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushford would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s, as well as insure her the house in town, which was now a prime object, it became by the same rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushford if she could.”  The egocentric worldliness of this is superb.  The author, it may be granted, has a certain playful satire in her manner here and elsewhere, when setting forth such views:  yet it seems to be fair to